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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the SSHRC-supported ‘Situating Science’ cluster grant, the Liu Institute for Global Studies at the University of British Columbia, the UBC Department of History, and the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Tech for sponsoring the workshop ‘Dark Matters II: Science and the Cold War in a Decolonizing World,’ which convened in Vancouver in September 2014. We are particularly indebted to Patty Gallivan and the rest of the Liu Institute staff for their logistical aid, and to Hank Trim, who rendered invaluable service as our conference ‘runner.’ In addition to the contributors to this volume, we are also grateful to the other workshop participants, particularly Nick Cullather for his always stimulating interventions, and also John Beatty, Jeffrey Byrne, John Di Moia, John Harriss, Alexei Kojevnikov, Steven Lee, Hiromi Mizuno, Suzanne Moon and Carla Nappi, who animated a memorable series of discussions. Finally, we thank Martin Collins for his enthusiastic support in bringing this volume to publication.
Notes
1. Consider, for example, Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb; Anderson, Nucleus and Nation; Barker, “Engineers and Political Dreams”; Gavin, Nuclear Statecraft; Krige et al., NASA in the World; McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth; Medhurst, “Atoms for Peace and Nuclear Hegemony”; Osgood, Total Cold War; Phalkey, Atomic State; and Redfield, Space in the Tropics.
2. On the history of development, particularly in the cold war era, and its blend of social knowledge and high modernism, see, for example, Latham, Modernization as Ideology; Engerman et al., Staging Growth; Connelly, Fatal Misconception; Simpson, Economists with Guns; Cullather, The Hungry World; Ekbladh, The Great American Mission; McVety, Enlightened Aid; Hecht, Entangled Geographies; and Wang, “Colonial Crossings.”
3. Anderson, Imagined Communities.
4. For examples of the assertion of national identities and strengthened conceptions of nation-ness in response to threats from perceived outsiders, see Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 135–6 and 138 and Winichakul, Siam Mapped, esp. chaps. 4–7. Hobsbawm, 136–8 notes the impact of the Versailles treaty in encouraging the nationalist claims of anti-colonial movements post-WWI, and the ironies involved in multiple nationalist claims that reflected imperialist divisions of territory. Consider also Timothy Mitchell’s observation about international organizations’ demands for economic statistics, particularly after World War I, and their power to turn statistical self-representation into a new national norm. Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 100–01. Recent studies of social knowledge in China also underscore the extent to which the nationalism of Chinese elites from the late nineteenth century to the Republican period drew upon colonial power and foreign claims that associated modernity with medical and statistical knowledge. Lam, A Passion for Facts and Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity.
5. On the risks and pitfalls of postcolonialism as a frame for understanding the history of technoscience in Latin America, as well as the limitations of the concept of “Latin America” itself, see Medina et al., “Introduction” to Beyond Imported Magic. On recent efforts at reframing, in which the United States figures as the first post-colonial nation, see, for example, Yokota, Unbecoming British and Saler, The Settler’s Empire.
6. For example, from 1900 onward, writer José Enrique Rodó’s famous essay, Ariel, crystallized anxieties about modernity, civilization, and identity for intellectuals throughout the Spanish-speaking world in the western hemisphere. Such ruminations reflected long-term efforts to grapple with the status of Latin America in a world of imperial powers.
7. Such concerns about science, technology, and the project of the nation have resonated throughout much of Mexico’s history, whether in the context of steam engines and technological development during the era of the Porfiriato, the project of Deweyan progressive education, modernization, and the incorporation of the indigenous into the Mexican nation in the immediate post-Revolutionary decades, ambitious public health projects and their associated notions of nation-building and uplift in post-Revolutionary, 1920s Mexico, or the post-World War II effort to develop a Mexican pharmaceutical industry. Aviles-Galan, “A Todo Vapor”; Rodriguez, “The Practical Man”; Birn, “Revolution, the Scatological Way” and Soto Laveaga, Jungle Laboratories.
8. For example, the ties between technoscience and nationhood have featured prominently in the history of medicine and public health in Latin America and the place of Rockefeller philanthropy in the development of public health in the region. See, for example Palmer, “Central American Encounters”; Brannstrom, “Polluted Soil, Polluted Souls”; Abel, “External Philanthropy and Domestic Change in Columbian Health Care” and Williams, “Nationalism and Public Health.” Consider also the case of Cuba, where after the American occupation, nominal national independence under the Platt Amendment was conditioned, in significant part, upon the Cuban government’s ability to ensure sanitary standards and satisfy American demands that the island nation not serve as a source of yellow fever outbreaks that could threaten the United States. Hence Cuban physician Carlos Finlay’s status as a national hero (and hero throughout Latin America) for his identification of the mosquito as the key vector of yellow fever, as well as the particularly prominent place of medicine and public health in the history of the Cuban state throughout the twentieth century. Espinosa, Epidemic Invasions, esp. chaps. 5–7. Diana Obregón’s account of leprosy control, state power, and aspirations for modern nationhood in Colombia in the early twentieth century also speaks to the intimate ties between public health and nation-building in Latin America. Obregón, “The State, Physicians, and Leprosy in Modern Colombia.”
9. Young, “The Age of Global Power,” 291.
10. Wang, “Colonial Crossings,” 189. For example, as Wang’s essay quickly outlines, racial hierarchy and racism were not confined to colonial and imperial governance. Notions about the necessity of racial uplift and the challenge of incorporating the indigenous into the nation strongly shaped public health and other national projects in multiple Latin American contexts. Eric Andrew Stein, in an essay on medicine, public health, and Indonesian nationalism in the mid-twentieth century, has observed that “biomedicine is itself a colonizing process” – hence its colonizing functions within nation-building contexts. Stein, “Hygiene and decolonization,” 65. James C. Scott’s somewhat unwieldly references to ‘domestic colonization’ or ‘internal colonization’ also capture the extent to which self-proclaimed projects of national belonging can be essentially colonial in form. See, for example, Scott, Seeing Like a State, chap. 2, in which practices such as the creation of cadastral maps, the imposition of surnames, and the reorganization of urban space served the common objectives of state simplification and legibility whether in colonial or ostensibly national settings. The phrase ‘domestic colonization’ appears on p. 72, and ‘internal colonization’ on p. 82.
11. Chapman, Cauldron of Resistance; Miller, Misalliance; Simpson, Economists with Guns and Field, From Development to Dictatorship.
12. Frederick Cooper’s recent study of French colonialism in Africa post-1945, by contrast, points out that the transition from colonial subjugation to national autonomy did not occur overnight. Leaders in ‘francophone’ Africa, for example, sought a variety of intermediate solutions with metropolitan France immediately after WWII, including federalism, before rejecting modes of governance that circumscribed their sovereignty. Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation.
13. Westad, “Exploring the Histories of the Cold War.”